Essential data centre technologies

Description

Data centre infrastructure course description

This course provides a foundation in data centre infrastructure technologies. It begins with a tour of virtualisation and the impact of this on the network before moving on to the spine and leaf design, how it works and how to scale. Layer 2 technologies enabling this architecture are studied in terms of the impact on the data centre. The course then progresses onto how Layer 3 technologies such as BGP, EVPN and VXLAN are used in data centre networks. The course then studies interconnecting data centres finishing with a section on automation and orchestration of both underlay and overlay networks.

What will you learn

• Explain the spine and leaf architecture
• Recognise the impact of virtualisation, containers and orchestration on the network
• Describe how the following technologies are used in data centres:
  Multi port aggregation
  Overlay networks
  MBGP, VRFs, EVPN
  VXLAN
  COOP
  
  

Data centre infrastructure course details

Data centre infrastructure course contents

What is Ethernet?
Data centres versus enterprise networks. Servers, Blades, Racks, Clusters, Storage, Virtual Machines, Hosts, guests, containers, orchestration. Virtual switches. Distributed switches. Live migrations (e.g. vMotion). IP addressing and VM traffic.

Data centre network architecture
Spine leaf design. North south traffic, East West traffic, Scaling: Ports, bandwidth. N+1 redundancy, ratio East West optimisation, oversubscription. 2 tier versus 3 tier Leaf/Spine. Pods. Underlay, Overlay

L2 technologies
STP vs link aggregation vs multi link aggregation. LACP, LLDP, CDP. Scalability. VLANs and VLAN pruning. L2 design recommendations. Disabling STP on edge ports.

L3 technologies
Underlay, Overlay, VXLAN, VTEP, VXLAN overlay forwarding, EVPN, IS-IS, COOP, MP BGP, VRFs, EBGP, IBGP, AS numbers, route reflectors. Anycast gateways. MTU considerations-for data and control planes. BUM traffic.

Data centre interconnects
Pods, fabrics, multi pods, multi fabric, multi site. VXLAN with BGP/EVPN Data center interconnect. Cloud integration, Inter Site Networks.

Automation
Automation and orchestration, Zero touch provisioning, Devops, Netops, telemetry automated configuration for underlay and overlay, SDN.